Changing Patterns of Religious Practice and Belief among Church-attending Catholic Women in Australia

Abstract

In Australia, women currently outnumber men in both Catholic congregations and the Catholic workforce. However, for complex reasons, the Mass attendance rates of women are declining. In opposition to this general shift away from church participation, a small yet significant group of Catholic women are still engaging in parish life. Using quantitative analysis to examine data collected in the 2006, 2011 and 2016 National Church Life Survey (NCLS), this article will explore the private and public practices, orthodoxy, and religious salience of Catholic church-attending women in Australia. It will consider reasons for an overall reduction in these measures of religiosity in successive generations and investigate apparent anomalies that find younger Catholic church-attending women possessing measures of religious practice that contest the notion of a uniform generational decline in Catholic women's religiosity.